Africa (sub-Saharan)

IMF Director Christine Lagarde gave the keynote speech at the Africa Rising conference in Mozambique on May 29, 2014. She discussed demographic, technological, and environmental challenges to growth, and policy priorities.

Isobel Coleman hosts Ann Bernstein, executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise in South Africa, and John Campbell, Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, for a discussion on how democracy can achieve inclusive growth in developing countries.

On May 17, 2014, heads of state from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, France, Niger, and Nigeria and representatives of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States discussed how to combat the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, which abducted more than 200 school children.

CFR Senior Fellow and former ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and Senior Advisor at the United States Institute of Peace Johnnie Carson discussed the recent violence and kidnappings in northern Nigeria and preparations for the World Economic Forum starting in Abuja.

CFR Senior Fellow and former ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and Senior Advisor at the United States Institute of Peace Johnnie Carson discussed the recent violence and kidnappings in northern Nigeria and preparations for the World Economic Forum starting in Abuja.

"As revelations of murder plots and assassinations mount, easy narratives of good overcoming evil become more and more difficult to sustain. The reality in Rwanda is far more complex. The mass killings of the 1990s and the recent assassination plots left almost no one untainted."

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down by unidentified assailants. The next day, the killings began. Over the next three months, as the international community stood by, an estimated one million Rwandans—Tutsis and moderate Hutus—were systematically slaughtered by Hutu extremists, mostly using clubs and machetes.

"The circumstances of the kidnapping, and the military's deception, especially, have exposed a deeply troubling aspect of Nigeria's leadership: when it comes to Boko Haram, the government cannot be trusted. Children have been killed, along with their families, in numerous Boko Haram bombings and massacres over the past five years."

"About 15 percent of Central Africans are Muslims, and for much of the country's 54-year history, they lived in relative harmony with the Christian majority. But in the last year, CAR has collapsed—first in a spasm of political violence and now in a grisly carnival of factional and religious slaughter that has left it one of the very worst places on Earth."

Born to professors in what was then still a British colony, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was a teenager when civil war broke out in Nigeria seven years after independence, and she ended up working as a cook for the Biafran rebels on the frontlines.

"During the first year of the Xi administration, China's policy toward Africa has shown several new trends that illustrate Beijing's evolving priorities and strategies in the continent. These new trends foreseeably will have significant implications for the future of Africa and Sino-Africa relations."

"Dieu-Beni is Christian, which is why it is odd to find him among the Seleka's mainly Muslim fighters. But like Mousaf, he is an exception — an example of why this conflict cannot be described as religious alone."

"Darfur's combatants, particularly the Sudanese government, have effectively neutered the U.N. peacekeeping mission, undermining its capacity to fulfill its primary duty to protect nearly 2 million civilians displaced by Sudan's genocide. During the past year alone, more than 500,000 terrified men, women, and children have poured into the region's already overcrowded refugee camps."

CFR Experts Guide

The Council on Foreign Relations' David Rockefeller Studies Program—CFR's "think tank"—is home to more than seventy full-time, adjunct, and visiting scholars and practitioners (called "fellows"). Their expertise covers the world's major regions as well as the critical issues shaping today's global agenda. Download the printable CFR Experts Guide.

The authors argue that the United States has responded inadequately to the rise of Chinese power and recommend placing less strategic emphasis on the goal of integrating China into the international system and more on balancing China's rise.

Campbell evaluates the implications of the Boko Haram insurgency and recommends that the United States support Nigerian efforts to address the drivers of Boko Haram, such as poverty and corruption, and to foster stronger ties with Nigerian civil society.

2014 Annual Report

Learn more about CFR’s mission and its work over the past year in the 2014 Annual Report. The Annual Report spotlights new initiatives, high-profile events, and authoritative scholarship from CFR experts, and includes a message from CFR President Richard N. Haass.Read and download »